Over two years ago, it was announced that the security scanner nessus will no longer be free software starting with version 3.0. Soon after that, several forks were announced. For a long time, none of these fork-projekts produced any output.
openvas was one of that forks and from my knowledge the only one that ever produced any releases. It recently had 1.0-releases for all packages, I just added ebuilds to gentoo.
While openvas isn't perfect yet (many of the old plugins fail, because some files had to be removed due to unclear licensing), it's nice to see that we have a free, maintained security scanner again that will fill the gap left by nessus.